Tableau Prep: Up & Running

Chapter 47. Keeping Your Data Up-to-Date

Once you’ve prepared a data set for analysis, the next choice you want to make is whether the process needs to be repeated and, if so, how often. If the input data source is updated, in all likelihood your flow will need to be refreshed. Whether or not you have Prep Conductor will determine what options are available to you to maintain the data.

In this chapter, we will look at the two different approaches to refreshing data sets—full and incremental—and how they differ. For each technique, we will walk through how to set it up in Tableau Prep Builder and Conductor. I’ll also offer a few key things to look out for when you’re using these techniques.

Refreshing Data

Refreshing data means checking to see if the original input has new or altered data. If it does, you must decide whether the new or changed data should be pushed through the data preparation flow. One of the advantages of Prep Builder is that once you’ve built the preparation flow, you can reuse it simply by clicking the run icon or setting up a refresh schedule in Prep Conductor.

The refreshed data may have the following changes:

• New rows

• Overwritten values

• New columns

Each type of refresh poses its own challenges but can be handled with the different techniques in this chapter.

When you first import or receive a data set for analysis, you should ask whether that data will refresh. If the answer is yes, you’ll likely need to rerun the data preparation flow each time ...